Research reveals dietary behaviours of supplement users
The study, reported in the journal Appetite, found that whilst vitamin and mineral supplement users are more likely to have a healthy dietary lifestyle compared to non-supplement users, the data also revealed that a higher percentage of supplement users have an unhealthy diet than a healthy dietary pattern.
“Both hypotheses – [that] vitamin and mineral supplement are used by people with unhealthy diets and by people who least need them – seems to hold true meaning,” said the researchers, led byled by Klazine van der Horst, from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich (ETH Zurich),
The researchers said that there should be further investigation into supplement users with an unhealthy dietary pattern, “as they might consciously or unconsciously belief that using vitamin and mineral supplements might compensate high intakes of unhealthy foods and low intakes of fruits and vegetables or an unhealthy lifestyle in general.”
Study details
van der Horst and his team noted that until now, very little had been known about the driving factors for vitamin and supplement use. They said noted that a split in opinion exists as to whether people use vitamin and mineral supplements to compensate for unhealthy diets, or whether people whom already have a healthy diet use such supplements.
The new research, based on data from 6189 respondents to the Swiss Food Panel questionnaire for 2010, examined correlates of supplement use, and investigated whether users can be categorised into specific clusters based on dietary lifestyle variables.
The research team reported that that for supplement use factors including: gender, age, education, chronic illness, health consciousness, understanding the benefits of fortification, and convenience food and sugar-sweetened beverage consumption, were all of importance.
van der Horst and his colleagues explained that that further analysis revealed three clusters of consumers – 1: healthy diet, 2: unhealthy diet, and 3: modest diet.
“Compared to non-users a higher percentage of vitamin and mineral supplement users was categorised in the healthy cluster and a lower percentage in the unhealthy cluster,” noted the research team.
However, they also noted that more supplement users were categorised as having an unhealthy diet (31.4%) than having a healthy diet (20.6%).
However, the authors noted that the findings explained only 11.4% of the variance, “which is very likely the result of the existence of various consumer groups with different and partly unknown motivations.”
“Future work is needed to examine whether these consumer groups also exist in other countries and to reveal important psychological factors and motivations that might vary between these groups,” they added.
Source: Appetite
Published online ahead of print, doi: 10.1016/j.appet.2011.08.020
“Vitamin and mineral supplement users: do they have healthy or unhealthy dietary behaviours?”
Authors: K. van der Horst, M. Siegrist
